Blazing a Trail in Home Recording

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Blazing a Trail in Home Recording

LAS VEGAS – Pioneer New Media Technologies is the first optical media vendor to hit the market with a combined CD-RW and DVD-RW unit, putting two types of recordable optical storage into a single unit.

At Comdex this week, Pioneer began showing off the DVR-103, which supports recording in CD-R (write once), CR-RW (CD rewritable), DVD-R (write once) and DVD-RW formats, the last of which can be rewritten up to 1,000 times.

The drive records DVD-Rs at twice the speed of previous products, and also is compatible with all of the CD formats, including CD-ROM and CD-RW.

The DVD-RW has a storage capacity of 4.7GB, which is the target capacity for the DVD Forum, developer of the DVD specification. There have been recordable DVD drives on the market, DVD-RAM drives, but they only had a capacity of 2.5GB.

The company expects that demand for converting home movies to the longer-lasting digital format could make DVD as popular as CD.

"Archiving videotapes will be the killer app for DVD-R," according to Andy Parsons, senior vice president at Pioneer New Media Technologies. He expects that people will convert their aging videotape libraries, which are only rated to last 15 years, with DVDs that are rated to last 100 years.

The internal drive will have inputs for both analog and IEEE 1394 Firewire, Parsons said. The drive will come with video editing software for producing DVD-R discs that are then loaded into DVD players for enjoying through the television.

Parsons said that DVD is quickly becoming entrenched as a consumer electronics standard, and that more than 15 million DVD players will ship this year. "Computer platforms come and go, but consumer electronics platforms (like CDs and videotapes) stay around," Parsons said.

Pioneer did not announce pricing for the DVR-103, but said it would be substantially below the $5,400 price of its previous generation offering. Parsons said the drive is expected to be available to OEMs in the first quarter of 2001, and that the cost of media should drop to $10 per disc.

Parsons said the DVR-103 supports copyright protection by hiding the CSS (content scrambling system) key on the discs, which prevents disks from being unlocked and played. The DVR-103 is compliant with version 1.1 of the DVDRW specification, which creates a pre-embossed area on the disk, which protects against "bit-for-bit" copies of encrypted movies.Parsons said that providing copyright protection is important since people in the movie industry are often afraid of new technology that enables illegal copying, such as when the VCR first came out.

But now they make twice as much money on renting and buying videotapes than in theaters, he said. "We want to see the same kind of thing with DVDs."

DVD-R disks should be readable on the PlayStation 2 and all but the earliest DVD players.

Parsons said that DVR "authoring" drives that use a slightly different recording method will continue to be available without support for copyright protection. The drives will not be available in retail stores. They will cost $5,400, while the media will go from $28 to 32.

Next year Pioneer will release a DVD-RW consumer electronics player aimed at the home video market that has become popularized by companies such as TiVo and ReplayTV. The drive will not have an electronic programming guide, but will function more like a VCR with basic recording features, Parsons said.

"The major limitation (of digital video recorders) is the lack of removable media," Parsons said, noting that his kids quickly fill up the 35 hours of video that his TiVo at home provides. He said that in 2002 the company will sell a video recorder that includes a hard drive for "buffer" storage, as well as a DVD-RW drive.